Consumers today use online marketplaces to purchase physical books and other reading materials. In many cases, when a consumer purchases a book using an online marketplace, a publisher associated with the online marketplace physically makes the book for the consumer. For example, the publisher may retrieve a digital version of the book, print the book onto paper using the digital version of the book, cut the paper in order to create the pages of the book, and then finish making the book by binding the pages together.
Problems can arise when making a physical book using the current process. For instance, publishers that make physical books are usually making more than one physical book at a time, and pages from a first physical book may get mixed in with pages from a second physical book before the second physical book is bound. As a result, the finished second physical book will include one or more pages from the first physical book, and thus be defective.
In order to try to solve this problem, publishers have adopted methods to insure that all of the pages belong to a single physical book before the binding process. Existing methods include weighing or measuring the pages of the physical book to ensure that the correct number of pages are present. However, such methods include a tolerance for error and thus, a finished physical book may still include one or more pages that belong to a different physical book.